Crafting For Those Dedicated to Experimentation

Art Batt

The bobbins are cleared and ready to spin, my wheel is tuned and ready to roll. I have more fiber than I should be able to use, from yak silk to an amazing roving from a local herd. I actually plan on starting with the fleece from Ellen’s flock since I have a spin in event tomorrow.

If I decide I am bored spinning normally then I have a sari silk tweed batt and a couple of Art Batts to spin.

Then all of the rolags I have been preparing throughout September, but I already posted those. Spinzilla begins 1am EST October 1, 2018. If I am honest, I hope that I am not awake for that, but I do think I will try and wake up one hour earlier than planned to get some spinning done. Sometimes life stinks but you need to get up and find joy in something.

For the August Fiber of the Month Club we were sent some beautiful fibers and Nepps to work with. If you do not know, nepps are ususally bits of fiber that were caught in the teeth of the drum carder and became little wool balls. Sometimes these are the weak tips, or if the fleece was too fine for the kind of carder you have it will result in nepps. In this case it looks as though it were little felted wool balls dyed to go with this box. They are a really pretty rainbow of colors and I was sort of excited to get them. I sorted them out by color and used some of the little bits and some Perendale Wool I had to create little rolags to spin woolen for a fine, light, colorful yarn.

Nepps went everywhere. I had not used a large amount to begin with, but what I did have went everywhere leaving few in the yarn.

I was undaunted, okay, I was a little daunted. However I decided to persevere. I used my drum carder and some Corriedale wool I had. I put down a layer of Corriedale, then some nepps sandwiched under some Wool, and I kept going. This resulted in a very pretty batt.

I then proceeded to spin this into a thicker yarn. The resulting yarn was neat and textured, but there were still a ton of nepps everywhere. When I plied even more nepps flew off, and when I washed the resulting skein even more nepps wound up flying everywhere. I sort of like how the skein turned out, but I really want to be able to spin a finer yarn with the nepps (I will probably never do anything with the bulky yarn).

I look forward to continuing this journey and seeing where I am taken. I will keep you posted as I learn more about how to use nepps in spinning. Until then, Happy Crafting!

Since it is past the 15th, okay just past…boy I’ve been spinning like a dervish..I’ve started spinning my Brights Pack!

Mom likes to listen to the Chaplet of Divine Mercy or the Rosary (or both) and then Morning Mass using her EWTN App on her iPad. Since I like to keep her company and feel the need for some quiet contemplation in the morning, but if I just listen I fall back asleep, I have been spinning while she listens to the meditations. According to mom the sound of my wheel whirring away is very soothing. I’m trying to tell her the fact that my wheel is making that whirring clunking noise is not a good thing, but since I cannot find the source right now we are at a standstill. I suspect that I need to disconnect, clean, re-oil, tighten, and reassemble the footman that connects my treadles to my wheel. But since that involves the wheel being upside down and empty it isn’t going to happen until this spin is completed at least.

Because of her quiet time I have between 90-120 minutes in the morning of almost uninterrupted spinning time I have gotten quite a bit accomplished. I do not believe for a minute that I will be able to keep this pace up, especially since I’m usually running around doing other things in the morning also, but while it lasts I intend to enjoy it. If, somehow, I manage to get the last of my singles spun tomorrow morning, probably not since I’ve still got almost half of my fiber to spin, then I can put each single on a bobbin, or bobbins, and ply from there. I plan on having this be a three-ply yarn so I’ll have to see how much I can fit on my bobbins, first I think I’ll try and find my schacht travel bobbins and ply-up bobbins before worrying about putting singles on the smaller weaving bobbins.

With my extreme enjoyment of my spinning I Have not progressed very far on my knitting. What I have gotten knit up is beautiful and I cannot wait to see the end project. Thank goodness I cannot take my wheel to work, well I could but it would cause trouble, so I bring my knitting with me and get a couple of rows done while I am supposed to be on my lunch break, lol. This is probably enough of an update for today, I am going to upload pictures of my breed study sheets to another blog post that I will schedule to release tomorrow. I had a ton of fun creating them and I am already working on some variations as well as collecting some more breeds to spin!

There are a lot of resources out there for learning how best to use a drum carder, these past three articles are a great resource for introducing a lot of the concepts involved in drum carding. This blog is probably a good one to follow also.

With this article, I especially liked the tip where the author says to hand card some of your smaller bits of fiber first to spread it out a bit more. I had never thought of that before, but it makes perfect sense to keep things thin and even.

I had a similar experience recently with a beautiful hand dyed top I picked up from a local dyer. I wanted to create a striped batt by separating out the yellow from orange from red. The colors blended a bit more than I thought I wanted, but the end result is two fantastic batts, with sparkle (I like sparkle so I added sparkle), that I plan on spinning separately and then plying together. As soon as I am done enjoying the fluffiness that is their batt form.

I love the newsletters I get from Strauch Fiber Equipment. They always lead me to such wonderful places. In this case the article points out, in a very quick way, a method of adding in extra materials into a batt, that goes through a drum carder, without getting extra things stuck in the drum carder. Great article!

I cannot, for the life of me, believe that summer is OVER! It seems like summer just began and here I am looking at my last Wooly Wednesday Class Tomorrow! We are starting up “Fall Crafting” next Monday during the afternoon but this still seems like the end of an era.

Wooly Wednesday’s could not have gone better if I had tried. I do have some plans for how to modify these classes for the spring and summer in 2018 so that they are more comprehensive, don’t rush my students as much, and cover more students and class time for the same amount of supplies (my boss will like that one).

LOOK AT ALL OF THE COOL STUFF MY LADIES CREATED THIS SUMMER!!!!!

This summer of Crafting ROCKED, so did my Wooly Wednesday Ladies. I hope to see you this fall, I miss you already!